Problem Solving and Decision Making sits at the end of the Core Competency framework for a reason. It is the competency that all other competencies lead to. Leadership and Teamwork shapes how you gather and weigh input. Communication determines the quality of information flowing into your assessment. Knowledge gives you the tools to diagnose correctly. But the output — the moment where all of that processing results in a course of action — belongs to COMP-09.
Within that competency, this behaviour addresses the mechanics of that process: setting the right priorities, generating and genuinely considering options, and then committing to a decision without hesitation. Three steps. Each one matters. Each one has specific failure modes that are well-documented in accident and incident reports. And each one can be developed deliberately through practice.
"The quality of a decision is largely determined before it is made — by the clarity of the priorities, the range of options considered, and the discipline of the process that produces it."
Setting Priorities Appropriately
In a developing situation, not everything demands attention simultaneously — but it can feel that way. The crew that attempts to address everything at once addresses nothing well. Setting priorities appropriately means identifying which problem to solve first, which information to gather next, and which tasks to defer — and doing this correctly under conditions where the answers are not obvious and the pressure to act is building.
The foundational discipline is time assessment. Before committing to any course of action, the first question is: how much time do we have? This single assessment determines everything that follows. When time is genuinely available, a structured process is possible. When it is not, the priority is to manufacture time — slowing down, requesting vectors, entering a hold — before the situation consumes the options it needs to resolve itself.
The most common prioritisation failure is not acting on the wrong priority — it is treating every task as equally urgent and allowing cognitive overload to degrade the quality of all of them simultaneously. In a developing abnormal, the priority is almost always: aviate, then navigate, then communicate. What sits below that hierarchy can wait.
Workload Management is the enabling competency here. A crew that has not managed their workload effectively will find that prioritisation becomes reactive rather than deliberate — they are responding to whatever demands attention most loudly, rather than deciding what deserves it most. The crew that has protected spare capacity through good workload management arrives at the decision point with the cognitive resource to prioritise correctly.
Identifying and Considering Options Effectively
The most persistent error in aviation decision-making is not choosing the wrong option. It is anchoring on the first plausible option and failing to generate alternatives. A crew under pressure reaches quickly for a familiar solution — and that solution, even if adequate, may not be the best one available. The behaviour requires not just identifying options but genuinely considering them — which means resisting premature closure long enough to check whether something better exists.
In a multi-crew environment, option generation should be collaborative. The first officer who raises an alternative the captain hasn't considered is not undermining command authority — they are performing a core crew function. The captain who creates an environment in which that contribution is welcomed will consistently make better decisions than one who doesn't. Leadership and Teamwork is directly enabling here: the quality of options available to the decision-maker is a direct function of the psychological safety of the crew.
TDODAR — structure for non-time-critical decisions
When time allows, TDODAR provides the structure that moves a crew from situation to decision in a way that is deliberate, collaborative, and auditable. The O step — options — is where this behaviour is most directly exercised. Developing more than one genuine option before committing is not indecision; it is the discipline that separates a considered decision from an instinctive one.
BRAN — evaluating competing options
When options are genuinely competing and the stakes are high, BRAN provides a fast, structured way to evaluate each one against what matters before committing.
Committing to Decisions
Commitment is the step that converts a good decision process into an operational outcome. And it is where two distinct failure modes live — on opposite sides of the same point.
The first failure mode is the pilot who delays commitment — waiting for certainty that rarely arrives, hedging, revisiting options already considered, letting the situation degrade while options narrow. This is indecision dressed as diligence. A decision made with 80% of the available information and acted on promptly will almost always outperform a decision made with 95% of the information twenty seconds too late.
The second failure mode is the pilot who commits but remains rigid — who treats the decision as closed once made, and resists updating it even when circumstances have shifted fundamentally. Aviation is a dynamic environment. The correct response to new information that invalidates a previous decision is to update the decision, promptly and without ego. Commitment means acting decisively on the best available information. It does not mean treating that decision as immovable.
"Commit to the decision. Act on it fully. But keep the picture updated — and change the decision if the picture demands it."
Knowledge and the Confidence to Decide
There is a direct relationship between technical knowledge and decision-making quality that is often underestimated. A pilot who knows their aircraft limitations, their company procedures, and their regulatory framework does not just make better-informed decisions — they make decisions more confidently and more quickly. The cognitive overhead of uncertainty about what the manuals say, or what the options are, sits squarely on top of the already significant cognitive load of an abnormal situation.
Normal operations are the training ground. The pilot who applies structured decision-making discipline during routine operations — who uses TDODAR on a diversion decision that could have been made on gut feel, who runs BRAN questions when reviewing a minor contingency — is not being pedantic. They are building the patterns that activate automatically when there is no time to think. Good decisions under acute pressure are the product of good decisions made repeatedly in ordinary conditions.